There's nothing like a good vaccine debate to end a mommy friendship. But a fight brewing at a school in Billings, Montana over an HPV vaccine clinic is a good reminder to the anti-vax crowd that they can disagree with us ... but boy do they need us.

Tabatha Pearson claims the Gardasil vaccine caused her elder daughter's infertility. It's a rumored side effect that hasn't been supported by any investigation by the Centers for Disease Control, but OK, fair enough, she's a concerned mom looking out for her own kids. That makes sense.

What doesn't make sense? Pearson is trying to shut down a clinic that would provide a life-saving vaccine for other fifth and sixth graders in her local community at a fraction of the cost.

Seeing a baby hooked up to oxygen and feeding tubes is totally and completely gut-wrenching for any parent. And as I sat today and watched a news clip about a 4-month-old baby named Everlee who almost died after a bout with whooping cough, I couldn't help but feel my stomach sink a bit. Whooping cough is an "old disease" that we are suddenly hearing about again because more and more parents are refusing to vaccinate their kids. And that's just scary.

Poor little Everlee was just a few weeks shy of receiving her shot against the disease. But a child who was likely un-vaccinated at her 9-year-old sister's school happened to contract whooping cough before that, and the sister likely brought it home on her clothing because of how contagious the disease is, which is how doctors think Everlee probably caught it. And then she wound up in the intensive care unit fighting for her life.

This was one of those Tweets that just sprang, fully-formed, from my imagination: “At a certain point,” I said, “climate-change deniers and vaccination refusers start to look the same.” It went straight to my Facebook, and slowly, quietly, people began contacting me to say they agreed and were baffled by the phenomenon.

When did it become fashionable to be ignorant? When did we decide that science was stupid?

Hey, I’m all for questioning authority and rising up against oppression and all that. Raising our voices to effect change. But I believe in being well-informed, which is why I like science: nothing is proven 'til it shows up in a double-blind experiment. I live in an extremely wealthy, progressive, left-wing enclave that is notable for having drastically dropping rates of immunization. The richer the neighborhood, the fancier the private schools, the more likely the kids will be unprotected from polio, mumps, measles, and rubella.

Guess what's floating around in vaccines? Cellophane. No, this isn't another of those "aborted fetal tissue, pig parts, space rocks" rants about how you're poisoning your kids and must be stupid if you don't know what's in them. But there are some freaky things in vaccines that are intentionally included. This one happens to be an accident though, or at least just poor processing.

Charred cellophane was found in some vaccines by Merck, and the FDA says it's the fault of the plant that makes the vaccines. It looks like this is hardly a surprise either, based on previous findings in past inspections. Yikes.

I know that I, for one, kind of went “buh?” when I heard there was a chicken pox vaccine. Unlike polio and German measles, I thought it was a harmless inconvenience. Did I love sitting in the bathtub with an oatmeal-filled sock as my skin oozed and I missed days of my beloved B’nai Or nursery school? No. But it was over in a flash, it seemed.

Except that for 100 kids each year, chicken pox actually used to prove fatal. I know -- that kind of blows my mind. And I say “used to” because child deaths from chicken pox have decreased by 97 percent since the vaccine was brought into general use 12 years ago.

Wow. Very few deaths is great, but almost none is even better. Absolutely, I'll get that vaccine for my kid.

When I wrote about how life-saving breastfeeding is sometimes avoided in third-world countries because of superstitions, I compared that to moms here in the U.S. and other first-world countries who avoid life-saving immunizations because they have misinformed ideas about vaccinations.

Well, the comments came thick and fast. Many were furious at me for making that comparison, but I stand by my statement. And here’s why.

If you're a new mom struggling with the decision of whether or not to vaccinate your baby, I can sympathize -- I agonized over the choice when my first child was born almost 10 years ago. That was when mercury = autism rumors were running high, and I was terrified of what the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine) might do to my daughter (since then, the initial study linking vaccines to autism has been called a fraud).

But the news that measles cases in the U.S. are at their highest in 15 years makes me glad I listened to my pediatrician and went ahead with the vaccinations.

Get ready to line up on the pro- and anti-vaccine side of the debate, as a new vaccine has been approved by the FDA for infants and toddlers. Menactra, a vaccine used to prevent meningitis for people ages 2 to 55 is now approved for babies as young as nine months.

Meningitis is especially scary as it can be difficult to diagnosis in babies and toddlers. The symptoms are stiff neck (how can you ask a pre-talker if his neck feels stiff?), high fever, and headache. Meningitis can also turn deadly in 15% of those who fall ill, even with treatment. It's a serious disease that we should all work to keep at bay. But some people are automatically suspicious of vaccines, no matter how much good they do, and how many lives are saved. You know who you are.